The Northeastern men’s hockey team now has nothing to play for besides pride.

No playoffs to make, no winning record to aim for and, as of Monday night, no Beanpot trophy to win.

(And furthermore, as of later Monday night, no chance to beat BU in a consolation game and hand them a last-place finish.)

The only thing motivating Huntington hockey now is avoiding historic failure. A major tenet of sports psychology is playing to win, not to elude disappointment. Inevitably, though, this Husky team has been reduced to doing just that.

The current squad is at risk of finishing the season with the lowest win total in school history. The fewest number of games the Huskies have ever won in a season is two – in the program’s first year, 1929-30. They only played seven games back then. This year? Twenty-six games in and half the win total. That should put things in perspective a bit.

As for the post-World War II college hockey era (no games were played between the end of the 1942-43 season and the 1946-47 season), when teams began to schedule more games, the lowest tally came during the 1969-70 season, when the team went 3-20-0. Interestingly enough, that year Northeastern surrendered five goals to Boston College to lose the opening round of the Beanpot, then dropped a 5-4 overtime heartbreaker to Harvard in the consolation game. Recent NU Beanpot Hall of Fame inductee Dave Poile, who captained that team, will probably experience some d